Blogger release new themes and updated features

Good news for Blogspot users, this week Blogger announced on their blog that they were releasing some beautiful new themes for the popular blogging platform.

The four new themes should now be available in your dashboard, they are:

Contempo – As good for a photo as it is for a story, Contempo puts a fresh, modern spin on life’s many adventures.

Soho – Spare and simple, Soho is a gallery built to showcase your latest photos, designs or musings in their best light.

Emporio – From projects to objects, Emporio can take any array of posts and display them in a neat and tidy way.

Notable – Whether you’re feeling pithy or profuse, Notable is your notepad for scribbles, stories, and so much more.

The New Blogger Themes: Contempo, Soho, Notable and Emporio.

These new themes are mobile responsive so they will automatically adjust to any screen and have quick loading times, both of which are important for SEO in 2017.

The four themes come in a variety of colours and have some new features (including a nicer comment section and the ability to hide/show gadgets without having to delete them).

They are coded slightly differently to the previous themes available, but can be customised in the Template Designer. You can also edit the template code directly in Blogger’s HTML Editor too to fully customise them to suit your style.

Want to switch to one of the new themes? On your Dashboard, go to the Theme tab and select the one you want to try. Remember to back up your old theme first!

I’m hoping this means we’ll continue to see even more updates to Blogger soon, as they’ve been tweaking a few things on the interface over the past few months. I can’t wait to have a play around with the new Blogger themes and introduce the latest features to themes of my own. Keep an eye out for new tutorials and pre-made themes!

Will you be switching to any of these themes? What tutorials would you like to see for them?

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27 comments

Actually they are not mobile responsive yet. I’ve installed the Emporio on my Blog and there’s so many flaws that I just don’t know where to begin. It looks horrible on mobile, there’s no way to adjust the sidebar, it’s so small that I can’t run the 300×336″ ads. Instead of letting up adjust the width, it gives us a slider at the bottom of the column… how funny!. Also my EngagYa post shows up on my homepage. Oh, and it doesn’t accept any CSS code that I put into the ‘add CSS’ location in the template, so my Google ad is off centered….. i’m sure there’s more but i’m exhausted.

Oh no! Not sure why you’re having problems with it Lily, I’ve been testing them out and haven’t noticed any issues. Adding CSS to Custom CSS in Template Designer adds the styling to above ]]> </b:skin> in Theme file, as it should. The Item Page Sidebar falls nicely under posts and takes up full width of device, the main Sidebar slides in as Canvas Menu and looks great!

Thanks doll!, I will try adding my CSS in the Template instead of in the section of the template editor where it says “add CSS”. I will also read over your consultation service. I just registered with Teachable and i’m creating my very first course… yeah! Everyone says I need WordPress to promote and launch it and I really do agree, I think you’re the perfect person to give my $$$ to to help me create my vision….. i’m gearing up for a summer launch so I will be in touch!

Hello. With some tweaking of the blog-pager (specifically nextPageLink and previousPageLink) in Theme > Edit HTML, you can change the “more posts” to be “newer” and “older” links like in previous Blogger themes. This post on Customising the “Newer & Older Posts” Links may help you get the correct code snippets to use. From there, you can install a numbered pagination using this tutorial. Hope that helps!

I love these new themes! I chose Soho and I just noticed that the sidebar is hidden in the left side. Only open if you press the three lines. Do you know how to make it not hidden? I would rather have it there whole time 🙂 Thank you in advance!

Hello. On larger screens the sidebar is there, on smaller devices it becomes a slide out menu. You can remove this functionality in Theme > Edit HTML, though you’ll have to re-adjust a few elements and move the sidebar beneath the post to allow the theme to be responsive.

I have switched already. Can’t wait for your tutorials. My issue with the new temps is the main page width. It is not as wide on desktop as I wish it could be. Also, the alignment of the snippet of post for temps like emporio. I wish the picture and text can be centered instead of left aligned. So if you can address this, it would be helpful.

Customizing anything for the mobile templates. I’ve been applying some CSS to a new desktop theme and it looks great–exactly how I want–but it’s obviously changing the mobile template, too, only it’s in ways that don’t look right. I’ve been trying to customize it by using the .mobile class but it doesn’t seem to be affecting this new template at all. I’ll keep working on figuring it out for myself in the meantime! Love your blog – if I ever get stuck when designing I can almost always find an answer here! Thanks!

If you can teach us how to modify that dropdown bar that fixes the search bar and mini menu on the left it will be great. How to add more buttons to it, or delete the mini menu and put the static pages menu on it (keeping the searching bar), for example.

Hi, loved your post, i installed the Emporio theme but there’s a problem. The gadget only appear on the homepage and not on the posts. The sidebar’s empty in posts. Could you please help? I made a test blog here: http://testingnoside.blogspot.com
Regards

Hello, you would need to add the gadgets to both the Sidebar and Sidebar (Item Page) sections in Layout. The theme is setup to show two different sidebar depending on what type of page you are visiting.

Hi there! I’ve switched from the simple theme to the notable, after trying out soho and contempo. The trouble with all these new themes is that they can’t be customized enough to satisfy most. To be honest it’s disappointing. For example, I can’t center the header image (my logo). You can’t have a full length post either on your landing page. The posts are not centered based on the screen monitor…(I’m trying to tweek on that without any luck). I tried to add a border line at the top of my blog…that didn’t work either. There are so many limitations to the design that I’ve almost given up trying anymore! I’m totally frustrated. So, I would love any tips on how to fix all these issues. Thanks!

Hi Velvet. It does take more coding knowledge to customise the newer themes, but that’s what happens when the functionality used in the theme is more advanced. The header image can’t be centred because the subscribe and search links are taking up that space on the left. You could move those elements to the block above and then make the header full width to centre it. Similar method would be needed to centre posts. For full content posts you need to change postBodySnippet to postBody in the body section of your theme. Finally, to add a border line at the top of the blog add body {border-top: 10px solid #000;} to your CSS. You have some plain text in your CSS that needs to be removed. Hope this helps!

Thank you for the insight, I really appreciate it. Unfortunately, my coding knowledge isn’t adequate to successfully make any of the tips you gave me work 🙁 I unlocked the subscribe and search links but the search couldn’t be moved, while the subscribe link didn’t look the same anymore after moving it! I then tweeked at the postBody as you suggested and I only managed to get the full content of each post on the left, but next to it an image snippet of the post was also in the middle! As for the header image: well I’ve given up on that. That’s what happens when you don’t have any coding knowledge…

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